Founding Mother: Mariana Van Rensselaer and the Rise of Criticism

In his recent obituary for Ada Louise Huxtable, the Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Hawthorne quotes Wim de Wit, head of architecture at the Getty Research Institute, who describes the first architecture critic for The New York Times as “[speaking] powerfully as a woman in this world of men, the architecture world of the 1960s and ’70s.” This seems undeniably true, but it got me thinking. Huxtable’s crucial contribution was not simply to speak “powerfully as a woman in this world of men.” This she certainly did, splendidly, and from the most powerful media platform of her era; yet it seems important to note that women have been “speaking in this world of men” for a long time now. It’s true that Huxtable, in the early ’60s, pioneered the position of full-time architecture critic in America; and she not only made it her own but also shaped a template that others would follow. But she was not the only female candidate for the job. Not then, not now, not before. As a woman writing about the male-dominated building profession, Huxtable belongs within an admirable historic lineage — a caveat which in no way undercuts her achievements; as a female architecture critic in the early 21st century, this seems to me deeply reassuring.

Patterns of Houston

I just spent two and a half days in Houston preparing to write about two new university art spaces, the James Turrell Skyspace at Rice and WORKac’s addition to the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. My review will appear in an upcoming issue of Cite, so I will say more about those experiences when that comes out. I did manage to capture the Skyspace’s glorious dawn pink on Instagram. Too bad about the competing light shows on the flanking hospital towers.

Why Bernadette Fox Is Scary

Maria Semple’s novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, is a satire of many things. Written in the form of a contemporary epistolary novel, its text links emails, blog posts, itineraries, invoices, police reports and school-home newsletters to tell the tale of one small family beset by a plague of well-meaning locusts. Even the foundations of their house – a former Catholic girls school that overlooks a neighborhood of Seattle’s single-minded Craftsman bungalows – are being undermined by blackberry vines. The father, Elgin Branch, is a Microsoft employee, a TED Talk cult figure, and a classic absent-minded professor, such a genius, so unworldly, that he never notices the status anxieties of his colleagues on the company’s private shuttles. All he cares about is the WiFi.

It’s Toasted: Modernity and “Downton Abbey”

“Is it not enough that we are sheltering a dangerous revolutionary, Mrs. Hughes? Could you not have spared me that?” asks Carson, the butler, midway through last night’s episode of “Downton Abbey.” That is not the mention of the word prostitute at Downton, the Earl’s middle daughter being jilted at the altar, or even the revolutionary Branson appearing at dinner in his daytime suit. That is an electric toaster, a pincher model according to the Cyber Toaster Museum, with a nickel-plated toast rack on top. “I’ve given it to myself as a treat,” says Mrs. Hughes, the housekeeper, placidly. “If it’s any good, I’m going to suggest getting one for the upstairs breakfasts.”

Balthazar Korab, RIP

For several months I have been planning to write about modern architectural photography, given the strange coincidence of new monographs on two mid-century greats, Balthazar Korab and Ezra Stoller. Sadly, this post is in memorium for them both. Stoller died in 2004; Korab passed away last week at the age of 86 in Troy, MI. Both were indefatigable chroniclers of American modernism. Stoller was the better known, author of the canonical images of much East Coast architecture, particularly the sharp-edged and glassy corporate towers. But Korab was a loyalist, and as such his work has an intimacy Stoller’s lacks, documenting process as well as perfectly polished product. The covers of the two books show their difference in a nutshell. Both use images of Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal (1962), perhaps the era’s most photogenic building. Stoller’s image shows people on the move, the interior of the terminal a collage of light and dark, the stairs and ramps backlit by great oval windows. The building is as much void as it is solid. Korab, by contrast, shows a moment of repose, a traveler in the background with hip cocked against a counter. The foreground is filled with one of Saarinen’s exquisite tiled curves, accentuated by a gradient of light and shadow. In places you can hardly see the lighted tile, in others they fade into shadow. But one is weill aware of the physicality of that curve, and the way it was made. The edge is not sharp but looks nibbled by thousands of regular teeth.

Kicked A Building Lately?

Well, have you? That question, the title of the 1976 collection of Ada Louise Huxtable’s work for the New York Times, embodies her approach to criticism. It is active, it is irreverent, it is personal, it is physical, and it puts the onus simultaneously on the critic and on her public to pay attention. To kick the tires of a building you have to be present at its creation and its completion. You have to let yourself be small beside it, walk around it, walk up the steps, pick (delicately) at the the joints, run your fingers along the handrail, push open the door. You have to let yourself stand back, across the street, across the highway, across the waterfront, and assess. And then you have to go home and write exactly what you think, in simple language, marking a path through history, politics, aesthetics and ethics that anyone can follow. I love her writing — and I will get to some choice quotes — but the first lesson I teach is that attitude. Architecture is for us, the public, and it is going to get scuffed.

George Nelson in Two Dimensions

There is one more month to see George Nelson: Architect, Writer, Designer, Teacher, an exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery that closes February 2. Even if you’ve seen enough knock-off Marshmallow Sofas to last a lifetime, I’d recommend it. The Nelson office’s greatest furniture hits are ranged around the central square of Paul Rudolph’s stepped gallery space, and, sitting up on modular platforms, their suggestive shapes and vibrant colors do hold the room. But the really interesting material (organized by the Vitra Design Museum and its chief curator Jochen Eisenbrand) is around the edges.

Bad Taste True Confessions: Erté

Last week Allen Tan posted on guilty pleasures.

Look: coming clean about a guilty pleasure takes a strange mixture of vulnerability and defensiveness. You’re knowingly putting yourself up for tomato-throwing. And at the same time, it’s confusing to be enjoying this thing in spite of – you really don’t know why! – your otherwise perfect taste.

His short essay struck a chord for me. Not only does he quote the key passage in Daniel Mendelsohn’s “A Critic’s Manifesto,“  the paragraph that explains how the best criticism works, by explaining the critic’s thought process and then leaving it up to you, but I have been meaning to ‘fess up in this space for some time.

As my children grow into their own tastes, some quite different from mine, I have started to recall my own early design assertions. I respect my parents the more for supporting my questionable choices. When I declared, at 10, that I was done with Marimekko and wanted instead sheets with blue roses (blue roses!) my mom went with it, going so far as to embroider matching pillowcases with an eyelet ruffle. If you know the adult me or my mother, you know we never ruffle. But she never let on.

Lunch With The Critics: Third-Annual Year-End Awards

As they do every year, our fearless critics, Alexandra Lange and Mark Lamster, gathered over lunch to bestow their annual design awards. Biased? Definitely. Parochial? Perhaps. Entertaining? Naturally. Despite a busy twelve months in which they communicated with the dead and published books (in paper and pixels!), they have nonetheless found time to put together the biggest, bestest, and most, well, brutal list in LWTC history. This year’s winners—and losers—follow.

Reintroducing the Tilletts

I was late to visit “The World of D.D. and Leslie Tillett” at the Museum of the City of New York, but as luck would have it this small, gorgeous exhibit has been extended through February 3. If you are interested in textile design, mid-century style, or creative partnerships, I would urge you to go.